


The Joy Of Creation: Reborn Fan Interpretation

by yarnwithpictures



Category: Five Nights at Freddy's, TJOC:R, The Joy Of Creation - Fandom, The Joy Of Creation: Reborn - Fandom
Genre: Gen, Horror, Video & Computer Games, video games - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-01
Updated: 2016-10-01
Packaged: 2018-08-18 20:51:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 3,089
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8175764
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yarnwithpictures/pseuds/yarnwithpictures
Summary: It's less of an interpretation and more me daydreaming a lot and writing it downI tried to make this actually scary (or at least suspenseful)





	1. Objective: Find Him

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Nikson](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=Nikson).



> I came up with this idea when I saw this game played on YouTube. I didn't actually finish it until after the story mode was released, so this story is based off of the free-roam demo (and a tiny bit of the first one). You can watch it played here ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VQ6IsEzG0kw) and here ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4E3ENQTwTvk&list=PL3tRBEVW0hiCq6GsiqZGyZwPNqC5UEJBZ ) if you want. It'll make a lot more sense if you do, anyway.

The house looked incredibly uninviting, especially now.  The sudden shock of lightning followed shortly by a crack of thunder lit up the grimy, chipping paint and the dilapidated roof.  This coupled with the rain cascading over the filmy windows and turning to slime in the rain gutters made the rumor that the place was haunted even more believable than it had been during the day.  

They adjusted their umbrella, palms already clammy at the thought of going inside.  Their teeth wouldn’t stop chattering, and their fingers were almost painful with cold against the metal flashlight.  A faint cone of light pushed through the dark from the end of it and illuminated the front doors.  They tried the right knob.  It was unlocked.  

The hinges squealed loudly, the sound crashing disjointedly with the rainstorm still raging outside.  They left the door open in case they needed to make a quick escape and shook their umbrella out as they stepped lightly down the hall.  

A small, battery-powered radio sat on a cart dripping an old, sad song into the air like molasses.  They crept past it and rounded the corner, turning right and facing another closed door.  It creaked when they pushed it open, and was very heavy.  Another dark hallway met them on the other side, and they stepped into it, dragging the flashlight beam over a window pane, and then down to a chair sitting in front of it.  

The door behind them thunked closed.  They gasped and whirled around, lunging for the handle.  It didn’t budge.  

“Shit,” they turned around and cast the light over the hall again, suddenly much more panicked now that they were unable to go back they way they had entered.  They paced to the window and decided that they could fit through it if push came to shove, but decided to at least look around some more before using it.  

The hall they were in branched into another one, and then another after that.  It seemed more like a maze than the first floor of a house.  Bookshelves, filing cabinets, and dressers were pushed up against the walls, collecting dust and rainwater from the open windows.  It smelled old and dirty in here, and they couldn’t shake the feeling that they weren’t alone.  

They finally found a room and stood in the doorway for a moment, examining the empty metal shelves, the American flag, and finally the desk.  A familiar pit opened up in their stomach when they recognized the tattered baseball cap sitting alone on the desk in front of them.  He’d been here.  

They walked further into the room and got close enough to the hat to touch the bill when a faint thumping suddenly came into focus.  It might have been audible for a few seconds before they noticed it, but now it was all they could hear.  Their heart jumped into their throat as the rain faded away, replaced with the the _thunk, thunk, thunk_ of what they guessed were footsteps.  They were heavy.  Slow.  Coming closer.  

A filing cabinet was standing next to the doorframe, and they ran to hide to the left of it so that the cabinet was between them and the doorway.  The footsteps got louder... and clearer... until they were an arm’s length away.  

The thing the footsteps belonged to was in the doorway.  

They sank to the floor as slowly and silently as they could, holding the lighted end of their flashlight tightly against their chest.  They were afraid to turn it off, sure that the clicking noise would reveal their hiding spot.  

Whatever this thing was was metal.  It made loud creaking noises whenever it moved, and its footsteps sounded like someone banging on metal trash cans.  It stepped into the room, squeaking and wobbling on its rusty frame.  They recognized its silhouette and covered their mouth to keep them-self from whimpering in fear.  Dread tightened around them, and they curled as slowly as they could into a ball, trying to blend in with the wallpaper before the bear turned around and limped loudly out of the room and back into the hall.  

They listened to the footsteps fade, hardly daring to breathe.  When the sound of the rain grew to replace the booming footfalls, they uncurled and wrung the flashlight between their hands, trying to breathe.  They had to get out of here.  It was hard to get up, their legs shaking and heavy.  They had to gather their courage for a moment in order to take a step into the hallway.  Both ends were empty and dark.  Where was the window?

They turned off the flashlight, just to be safe, and tried to retrace their steps to the window by the door that had locked them in.  They kept a hand on one wall, and the other strangled the flashlight.  A feeling of unease, like someone was staring at their back, made their skin crawl.  They forced the impulse to touch their back away and concentrated on looking for an escape.  

The footsteps started up again.  They froze where they stood and closed their eyes to listen, trying to figure out where it was.   It definitely wasn’t close, but that could change.  They had to keep moving.  

Everything was starting to look the same.  The same two walls seemed to be closing in on them, and they had to stop multiple times to keep the panic at bay.  It got especially difficult to keep track of the bear and recuperate at the same time.  

Harsh, heavy footsteps rounded a corner not far from them, and they hurried away from the sound, barely daring to go faster than a brisk walk.  They turned a corner of their own,  and then another, but in their attempt to be quiet, they went too slow.  

The bear stopped, its light flooding the hallway and casting their shadow against the floor, and then it started to run.  

They let out a shout of fear, and leaned into a sprint. The footsteps were so much heavier now; he was practically on their heels.  They rounded another corner, and then turned down a long hallway with a door at the end of it.  They ran for it, ramming it desperately with their shoulder and shouting when they lost their footing because of the stairwell on the other side.  

The stone stairs were hard against their ribs and knees, and they scraped their hands against the walls in an attempt to stop their fall.  They managed to drag them-self to a halt halfway down, facing the door at the top and rasping fearfully when they saw the bear looming in the doorway.  

It stared into the basement with the flood lamps it had for eyes, and then it turned around and lurched away.  They squinted at its retreating back in confusion for a moment before trying to get up.  They were pretty sure their knee was bleeding, and their ribs would probably bruise.  The flashlight was flickering at the bottom of the stairs.  

Their breath came out heavy and ragged as they made their way down to the bottom step on their butt, shifting down a step at a time.  They picked up the flashlight, banged it against their hand a few times to stop the flickering, and then got up from their spot on the ground with a grunt.  

The light from the flashlight revealed concrete walls and floors, with much the same furnishings as the floor above.  The air was dustier down here, and the flashlight had a hard time pushing into the darkness for longer than a few feet.  

They shuffled away from the stairs, but stopped not far from them and turned around to squint up at the open door to the first floor.  Maybe they should go back.  They could outrun the bear, and they probably wouldn’t find an exit in the basement.  What if he was down here, though?  What if they went back up and got out and left him here to die?  

They shook that thought away with a bite of panic and had just decided not to push their luck when they heard someone pounding on a door down the basement hallway.  No, it was… running?  They squinted into the dark in confusion, trying to figure out what it was.  Realization broke over their head and dread leaked into their stomach; they didn’t have a chance to turn around, let alone run in the opposite direction as two bright red pinpricks of light came jolting towards them at a sprint and closed in.  The red lights were set into the eye sockets of an animatronic whose face was suddenly inches from theirs, and then it was pulling back a metal fist with a scream.  The blow landed, and darkness followed.  


	2. Objective: Dream

Someone was talking.  Except it sounded too deep and distorted to be a someone. Some _ thing _ was talking, and they couldn’t figure out where it was coming from.  They tried to open their eyes, but it was too hard.  The left side of their face felt much heavier than the right, and there was a buzzing coming from the back of their head, like a bee was caught in the base of their skull.  The floor moved beneath them, and something was pulling the hood of their windbreaker so high that their shoulders were up by their ears.  They tried to say something, make a sound, but all they could manage was a heavier breath.  The floor beneath them moved again, and everything started getting softer, back to the way it was before the talking, which had been replaced with heavy, metallic footsteps.  The sound and the feeling faded away, and they went back to sleep.  

“Are you okay?”

They snapped out of a daydream, “What? Yeah, fine.”

He shook his head and knocked the bill of their cap down.  They pushed it back up and shoved him, but not too hard.  

“Dickhead.”

He laughed and got off of the picnic table.  “Come on, my mom’s probably waiting for us.”

“Did she get marshmallows?”

_ “I _ got marshmallows,” he pointed to himself proudly, like he usually did when mentioning buying things with his own money.  He was happy about getting his job and the money he earned doing it.  

They never liked to bring him down, so they smiled and punched his shoulder jovially, “Nice one.”

He practically glowed, and then the sun was gone and he was literally glowing in the dark that had replaced it.  

“Wooaah, when did you learn to do that?” they said, impressed.  

“Just now, I think.”

“Rad.”

He glowed brighter, and they started off towards the cabin together.  The forest disappeared behind them, and the path they both knew appeared in front of them as they walked towards what looked like a black hole.  His light got sucked in, and the drawstrings of their hoodie sort of danced on the wind in its direction.  It seemed far away, but too close for comfort at the same time.  

All of sudden, everything skipped.  He was there one minute, and the next he was disappearing into the black hole, wisps of his light still hanging in the air in front of it.  They reached out for him, feeling their stomach lurch and their feet lift off the ground.  

“Scott!” they said.  


	3. Objective:Escape

Just as his name escaped their mouth, they were falling, and then landing on something hard and not flat.  The floor lay underneath it, coated with dust and nearly frozen under their fingertips.  The air was just as cold, and something reeked.  It took them a moment to realize it was whatever they were laying on that stank, but turning their head in an attempt to figure out what it was was difficult.  

Their head  _ hurt,  _ it was pounding, and the whole left half of their face was immovable.  They could taste blood, and there was a quiet ringing in their ears that was making them more uneasy than they already were.  

Their fingers bumped into something on the floor next to their hand just as the door behind them clicked shut.  Something heavy and metal clunked down a set of stairs on the other side.  

It was a flashlight.  They gripped it like a lifeline and tried to move their legs.  They managed to pull their right knee up and moved their upper body in the same direction, trying to figure out what they were laying on top of.  Their knee ran into something that felt horribly like an arm.  

Dread made them freeze and gasp.  It was a body.  They were laying on a body.  

They couldn’t think for fear for a moment, but then a terrible idea occurred to them and an awful cry forced itself from the center of their chest.  

“Scott?” they choked, fumbling with the flashlight.  

“No no no,” they got it on and pointed it to their right, only to turn away with a wail.  

They forced them-self off of the withered corpse of their friend with a burst of adrenaline, the image of his- definitely his- smashed and sliced face burned into the insides of their eyelids.  

They sat there and sobbed into the still attic air, not noticing the footsteps approaching until they were a yard or so away.  

They blinked back tears and had to wipe drool and snot off of their face, forgetting that they were injured and sending a burst of pain down their spine when they put pressure on their eye.  They winced and blinked tears away, squinting with their only functioning eye up at the figure now planted firmly in front of them.  

Their breath was visible, and they switched between watching it puff and watching the fox for a minute.  They decided to turn their flashlight towards it just before its eyes came on.  It flinched away from their flashlight and covered its face with metal fingers and a hook that was screwed into the end of its arm.  

They shouted in surprise, turned to their left, and struggled to their feet, leaning against a wall.  They turned their flashlight off on the way up and moved along the wall away from the animatronic, but it followed close behind, like it was curious about them.  At least they knew how to get it to stay away.  

As if in response to this thought, the fox’s eyes came back on, and they whirled around to shine the light in its face again.  It screeched and flinched in almost exactly the same way, and they staggered past a post holding the ceiling up, their vision spinning from standing up for so long.  

They made it to a window and leaned against the glass, their palm stinging with cold as the fox stopped behind them.  They looked over their shoulder and pointed their flashlight, ready to flick it on.  

The fox’s eyes lit up, they made it flinch, and then they tried to wrench the window open.  

It didn’t budge.  Panicking, they reached for the closest thing, a squarish object sitting in a plastic chair next to them, and rammed it through the glass.  It shattered, and they dove through just as the fox’s floodlights lit up and cast their shadow onto the ground a story below.  


	4. Objective: Run

They landed with a hard  _ thud, _ crushing soda cans and squelching soggy garbage with a winded groan.  Their vision swam, and their head felt like it was going to burst.  The rain was more gentle than it had been when they’d entered.  It felt nice on their face mixed with the cold wind.  The air here felt different than the attic’s; less dusty and heavy.  They sighed, letting the stress and the fear leave for a moment before they remembered Scott.  

He shouldn’t have to rot in there.  They should tell the police, someone who’ll get him out.  Yeah.  They needed to leave.  Get up.  But suddenly, that felt impossible.  All of their limbs were heavy as lead.  Their neck wouldn’t lift their head, or turn it.  They knew from somewhere that they probably shouldn’t fall asleep again, so they fought it.  

They moved an arm and heaved them-self off the pile of full garbage bags, rolled into the overgrown grass beside it, and lifted them-self up onto their feet again.  Their ribs were aching, and their head hurt worse than ever, but they had to keep going.  They looked down at the flashlight-  _ his  _ flashlight, turned it on, and started their trek back to town.  

They shuffled down the front path, tired and straining to keep their chin off their chest.  The light they held bobbed around, and they zoned out watching it move over the plants and the dirt.  They almost bumped into trees and lost the path once, but they made it halfway without incident.  

A lone lamppost marked the halfway point between the house and the road, and they rested their shoulder on it for a moment.  Their vision was spinning again.  

They were just getting a grip on it when a twig snapped a hundred or so yards away.  It was loud compared to the drizzle that was still coming down, and they froze with the flashlight pointing towards the sound.  They moved it back and forth, looking for what had made the noise, but then thought better of it and decided to keep moving.  

Jogging now, they tried to keep their head up and their ears pricked in case they heard something else.  They were almost there.  

Their legs were starting to shake underneath their weight.  They stumbled a few times, but they didn’t fall.  Suddenly, they heard more footsteps.  A spike of fear went through their chest, and they started to run, looking back to flash the light at a pair of glowing eyes looking at them through the trees.  The eyes stopped moving, and they turned back to run flat out towards the road.  A few seconds later, with the road in sight, they heard a screech and it started running, too.  

They ran harder than they ever had in their life.  The road was there, but it was faster than them.  

They were in the road, passing a pair of headlights, it was absolutely  _ pounding _ towards them and then-  

A resounding  _ crash  _ and the screeching of tires had them falling to their knees with their hands over their head.  The car smashed into a tree and stopped dead, and then the bird fell onto the road, broken.  

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm gonna go watch Markiplier play the canon story mode now, woo
> 
> ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ftHdhxG5KAw )


End file.
